After spending a couple weeks with the product, I was delighted. Nest is a thermostat for the smartphone generation. And it would have saved me money on my heating and cooling costs…

If it worked in my house.

Let me explain. I installed the thermostat and thought it was working. After two weeks, I realized it wasn’t. If all you want is a thumbs up or down for the nest, it’s a thumbs up.

If you want a tale of buyer beware, read on.

Ignore the ugly remainder from my old thermostat. Nest even suggests you spackle and repaint before installing.

The Nest Learning Thermostat

The Nest Learning Thermostat isn’t like any thermostat you’ve seen.

It’s a scroll wheel with a combination of glass (housing an LCD screen) and brushed aluminum. It’s beautifully crafted, not a loose edge or out-of-place element. The design seems motivated, a word you couldn’t use to describe other devices in its category. Every time I saw it on my wall, I wanted to wave my hand and wake it up from sleep.

The interface works like an old safe combination lock. You twist the screen and it glides through settings, changes the temperature and types in information. To select options, you push the unit inward. It’s the only button it has but it’s a control scheme that’s intuitive, albeit a tad analog.

The Nest connects to your home wireless network, syncs information and self-updates. Outside of turning it off, there are three modes: heat, cool and range. Heat and cool are self-explanatory. You turn the thermostat as desired and a tiny indicator tells you the temperature. Range is also pretty easy to explain–set a high and low and Nest will keep it within those parameters.

The main selling point of the device (other than it’s beauty–seriously, I wanted to mess with the scroll wheel constantly) is that it learns your patterns and how warm you want your home.

For example, if you turn it to 22 degrees Celsius around 10 pm it will start doing that every night on its own. If you wake up every day at 7 am and adjust to 20 degrees, it’ll learn that too. If you leave to go to work, it has an ‘away’ mode to save energy. It doesn’t have to learn–you can also schedule routines yourself.

But there’s more. We rarely think about our thermostats. You may not even touch yours on any given day. Enter the apps. The information the device syncs with your wireless network is stored on an account. You can see that information whether you’re on iOS, Android or a desktop browser and control almost every feature of the device.

Screens from the web app and Android app. Pretty robust features.

I could see my heating and cooling schedules, detailed energy usage and change the temperature from my Galaxy Nexus and iPad. If I forgot to turn the device to away, I could use the app. The Nest gives control over a home in ways old thermostat can’t. Best of all, the interface is easy to use anywhere–there are no discrepancies between web and mobile platforms.

Buyer beware

So the big question you should be asking is: how could I know all this if the Nest didn’t work in my house? Well, that’s the problem. I thought it was working.

Let me start at the beginning.

Before ordering a unit on Nest.com (the only current retailer for Canada), you have to pass a compatibility test. You take off your old thermostat and tell the website about wires you see. It’s very easy and I was delighted my over-50-year-old house was compatible.

I got this review unit shortly after and was excited to install it. Following the instructions, I mounted the baseplate to the wall and connected the wires. After sealing everything up, nothing worked. I followed the instructions over and over, making sure to turn off the breakers each time and confirm all contact points were touching. I troubleshot online but found no help.

The innards. Really not as complex as I thought. Apparently I was wrong.

Next step? Call technical support. The support agent said the unit wasn’t getting enough power. He asked if I had a voltmeter to check the wires. I didn’t. He feared that I couldn’t power the unit–old thermostats needed less voltage than the Nest to work.

At a point of giving up, I called a friend. He’s an electrical engineer and had a voltmeter. He checked and said that the wires were fine. So we tried a little rewiring of our own and…it started working! It had enough power and was syncing. I could control it with my apps and it appeared to be controlling my air conditioning.

Appeared to be. For two weeks, my house did not move half a degree. I thought my air conditioning unit, which hasn’t been replaced or serviced since we moved in, was to blame. After two weeks of agonizing heat and blaming everything but the Nest (including the notion that we needed serious duct cleaning), I pulled it off the wall and put my old thermostat back.

Guess what started working?

I don’t blame the device. It did exactly what I told it to do. Every turn of the wheel, app request and temperature reading was accurate. And it was pretty.

I probably installed it wrong. I’m not an electrician or a Nest-certified professional. I got fooled into thinking it was working. In fairness, Nest told me (through its online tool) I was compatible. On top of that, it actually started behaving. Why would I think there was a problem?

This is why I can only recommend having the Nest professionally installed. It costs extra, but if you’re serious about this device, you’re not looking for something cheap. You want extra control with an end goal of saving cash in the long run.

A single Nest Learning Thermostat retails for $250. Professional installation costing $119. With that, you get someone who knows what they’re doing.

It’s hard to say that the high price is worth it when an ugly thermostat from a hardware store costs 25 bucks. But for the direction Nest is trying to push the heating and air conditioning industry, and for the control it gives, it’s a worthy product.

I'm a writer, journalist and producer. I went to university in Toronto and have pretty much grown up in this city. I love covering tech because it can get so far out in the weeds...but bringing that back... read more and relating that to people feels satisfying to me. I'm a gatherer, not a hunter. On Twitter: @theanandramView author's profile